First post, by johnvosh
Good day everyone. So I have been trying to get my Athlon XP 2500+ to run a bit cooler than idle at 50c. I have removed the heatsink twice now and cleaned both the CPU and heatsink and reapplied thermal compound. Each time I remove the heatsink, all the thermal compound is squished to the outside edge of the chip and there is very little if any on the die of the CPU, which I think is why it is running hot. I even tried running a Sempron 3300+ but I don't think my board likes running at 400 FSB.
How do I keep more of the thermal compound on the CPU die so that it actually cools properly?
The board in question is the Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2. It is on Bios version F5 right now because I can't update it to the latest. When I try to run the BIOS update, it just says chipset not supported, which makes no sense as I got it directly from the Gigabyte website. I've also got a Sempron 2800+ I might try and run as well if I can't get the 3300+ to run without Windows restarting when running 3DMark03.